Real Estate Investar is a powerful property search tool. In this Real Estate Investar review we go inside the program and I show you the positive an the negatives to help you decide if it is right for you.

Hi guys, in this video I’m going to do an in-depth review of Real Estate Investar which is the search tool for the Australian and the New Zealand market. I’m going to show you all the functions and the features of the tool. We’re going to go inside the tool and see exactly how it works. I’m going to show you what I find useful, what I think isn’t useful and hopefully I’m going to help you decide whether you think this tool is going to be useful for you or not. I’m a member of this tool. I signed up for the two-year membership and so I’m on a contract with them but I also just want to let you know that I’m an affiliate with them so if you do want to sign up go through my affiliate link, I’d much appreciate it – www.onproperty.com.au/rei and the links will be below this video. I’ll try not to let the fact that I’m an affiliate for Real Estate Investar cloud my judgment and cloud my review of their program. I want to show you an honest review of their program to really help you decide whether this is for you or not. So it’s not going to be fluffy as I’m not just going to say, “It’s all awesome, this is amazing.” I’m going to show you what is actually good and what is actually not that good. So let’s go and get into it.

Here we are at the home page. This is where you go if you go through my affiliate link www.onproperty.com.au/rei. There’s a two-minute video that you can watch but I find the videos is pretty fluffy and it doesn’t actually show you anything about the tool, it just kind of says how awesome that it is and your loss is going to change if you buy it. It’s a bit fluffy but I’ve already got an account, so I’m just going to login here. Using this tool is actually pretty simple. Everything you need is right here on the home page. You can see that there are seven different options. I’m going to go inside and show you each of these different options.

The “Investar Search” is the most powerful functionality of Real Estate Investar. It’s why I signed up for it and it’s basically the only thing I use if I’m truthful with you. I love this search tool. It really helps me find property and narrow down property and we’re going to be spending most of our time looking at this.

“Development Search” helps you find new built properties. If we go here we can see (there is always search functionality), but basically all it will bring back is new built property so it’s something that you can buy off the plan, like a house and land package or a unit in a new complex that’s being built, something like that. You can see through all the different off the plan sort of properties. The reason that I don’t like these is that often if you buy one of these properties, Real Estate Investar is likely to get a commission on this property. It happens all the time with sales people and things like that and so often these are overpriced for the market. That’s why I’m not super keen on it. But if you’re keen on buying a new built property then this is your one stop shop to find new built projects.

You’ve got “My Value” up which helps you analyze and value property. You’ve got “My Research” which helps you research suburbs in areas and properties. The “Property Analyser” is like a cash flow analysis tool. “Portfolio Tracker” helps you track your properties once you purchase them. And “Xero” it’s integrated with zero which is some online accounting platform so if you want to do your accounting online and all that sort of stuff then that’s going to help you.

Let’s have a look at Investar Search which is the most powerful tool that they have and basically the most important tool that you’re going to use inside here. Investar Search is really cool, it’s kind of like the Google of searching for real estate. You don’t just search for real estate in an area you can actually be more specific and you can look for properties based on keywords strategies. Keywords strategies are when a real estate agent uses a particular keyword in the listing. For example if we choose the positive cash flow keyword strategy you can see all of these keywords: 10% yield, 11% yield, cash flow, double income, dual income, granny flat, high cash flow, home and income, all this sort of stuff. And if an agent mentions any of these inside the listing then that property is going to show up. If these aren’t listed inside the listing then it won’t show up. You can also add your own keywords. You can add keywords to exclude, so maybe I don’t want properties with the granny flats so I could choose granny flat. Or maybe I don’t want renovation projects so I could choose renovate or renovation or something like that so you could choose a positive cash flow strategy without renovation properties in there. That’s kind of basically your keywords and how it works. You can search for your property types just type realestate.com.au.

You’ve also got a few other options. You can choose different land sizes, maybe I want minimum property yield of 7% and I only want a property that has been on the market for a maximum of six weeks or something like that. So like that you can also look at, so I only want suburbs with a population of at least 10,000 people or I only want average days on the market a maximum of 180, et cetera. Therefore you can do all that sort of stuff. You then click search and it will then load and show all of these properties to us. You can see that it’s loaded and you can see a bunch of different properties, here’s one – $130,000 and the current potential rent is $200 per week.

You can also sort by many different strategies. You can sort by keyword, relevancy of land size, listing price, postcode, distance from a certain post code, you can do the suburb rent, you do the potential yield – high to low, low to high, average days on market. Let’s do potential yield high to low and see what that brings up. Ideally that would bring up the properties with the highest yield first. We can see here property in South Hedland which I know is a mining town – $600,000, currently rented for $1,800 so there’s a massive yield on that property. You can see that basically they’re all from South Hedland, Slade Point – these are all going to be mining towns. Moree, is not really a mining town I think. We can see this property for $179,000 current potential rent $450 per week.

If you want to look into a property in more detail you can click on this “see full property details” and you can go through there and you can see potential rent $450 to $600 per week. It can be used as one household or easily converted into three by two bedroom flats. I’m guessing if you converted it, then that’s what the rent would be. As it is it’s probably not going to rent for that much. You can look at some suburbs statistics, the listings, house sales listings. You can see that properties in this $100 to $300 price range seem to be the bulk of the market there. So that’s exactly where this property lies and so that’s good. And you can see how many people own rents in the area – 42% percent renting (not too bad at all).

We can then do more things. So we can look at this property on domain.com.au which is where it’s listed. You can see all different things here, so Google maps, you could look at Wikipedia, you go to the Council website, etc. We can also analyse property in full so we click “analyse in full” and it brings up this analyser, so we can see rent of $450, personal ownership of so much. We can then click and that will generate our cash flow or we can click “get estimate” and that will bring up this “my valuable tool” which we can then go into more details to find the property. New South Wales, postcode 2400, Auburn Street, the address number is 312 and so we can click find address and that should hopefully find it for us. Did you mean 312 Auburn Street, Moree? Yes I did. Thank you very much. You can see here that this is the property. You can also double checked – six bedroom house, is that correct? Yes. Six beds, three baths, one parking. So it is 6 bed, 3 bath, 1 parking, that’s right. Put in the listing price – $179,000 and generate a report. Now we can see a report of this property so we can see the current market price estimate $160,000. These are not always completely accurate. It does give you a confidence score here but I have heard people say that it’s not necessarily completely accurate. Here we go, probable value range, probably more or you’re looking at something like that or it might be slightly overpriced for the market.

You can therefore go through and you can see the land size of the property. You can find sales history, so we can see that this was sold for $130,000 in 2007 and we can see when it has been on the market. Going all the way back we can see that they originally Real Estate tried to sell this in 2012 but then they took it off the market, they have relisted it in May and it’s now been listed under multiple real estate agents – LJ Hocker and Moree Real Estate for the last over six months. Because it’s now as I’m recording this it’s towards the end of December and so we can see that it’s started at $189,000 or not disclose might mean that it was not sharing or something like that and then obviously reduced it in November to $179,000. So they could potentially be willing to budge on this property and that could be used in negotiations so that’s really helpful there.

We can see a market snapshot so we can see all the details in Moree. You can see comparable properties as well, so you can say well is this probably similar to the one I bought or is it different? We can see 329 which was just the road recently sold; 112, and so basically, you get all the property details. The good thing about Real Estate Investar is you can get unlimited apm property data reports so you can do this on unlimited amounts of properties which makes it really useful.

That is basically the Investar tool and that is how I use the Investar tool. It’s a great way to quickly find positive cash flow properties or to search for renovation projects or all of that sort of stuff. Again, I’ll just quickly show you different keywords strategies. You’ve got capital growth, you can look for discounted property, properties that offer finance, positive cash flow, renovations, subdivide, strata title opportunities, unit title, off the plan and development. You can therefore use those strategies, like if you want something to renovate and it’s going to add value, refurbish, renovate, etc. and search for those.

I really like this tool. I think it’s really useful. I think if you’re going to sign up for Real Estate Investar you’re going to want to use this if you sign up. If you’re paying that sort of money you’re going to want to have this sort of functionality.

Let’s look at some of the other features over Real Estate Investar. We’ve already quickly looked at the “Development Search” which I don’t really like. “My Valuer” was the tool that we just looked at which allows you to see the valuation of any property that you want. And again you just fill that out you can get a valuation of the property. “My Research” is if you’re looking at a particular area you’ll probably want to use this. Basically, the way that I would use this is I would search for a particular suburb, maybe Cronulla in New South Wales and then click search. You can also search for properties. You can search for owners as well. If you know which owner owns it you can double check that. But let’s just look at the market activity search and this is going to show us sold properties in the area. Obviously you can change this, you can put rentals or you can view all the properties. We can see that these are all the sold properties in the area. And then you can basically just go through and you can start clicking on properties and you can see what they sell for – $1.9million (very nice), it’s a bit slow but you can see $1.5million, $1.3million, you can see all these different properties that have sold. Some units are sold over $1.15, obviously Cronulla is a pretty expensive area. “My Research” it’s interesting, it’s kind of a mock based version to see what properties have sold for in the area, so that’s pretty cool.

“Property Analyser” allows you to analyse the cash flow of any particular property. You can enter your details, you can also access it if we are back in our Moree property here and we can analyse it in full and it’ll then bring out the property analyser for us so we can know all those details are right. Click next and it’ll then bring out some reports for us, it’ll show us today you’re one, you’re three, you’re five, you’re ten. It’ll show you property market value, obviously these are going to be estimates for the area. We can see that your loan is unchanged. You can change your loan, the value ratio obviously and basically what it’s going to show you is equity in the property over the years. It’s also going to show you your gross yield and your net yield, it can show you your cash flow, so pre-tax cash flow over the years, so if you want $224.00 per week positive cash flow that this estimate is giving us, you can see deductions and you can see your cash flow after tax. So that is basically the Property Analyser. It’s not super awesome, or not really so, I don’t know, I find it quite confusing.

I prefer my own tool but then I created it myself. My tool is On Property Plus which is my premium membership website which you can get at www.onproperty.com.au/plus. In mine, I guess it’s a bit more manual, you have to type in $179,000 and then $450 per week and then interest rate and that’s going to estimate your weekly cash flow. I just find it so much easier to see that. I guess this tool does do predictions over the years so it’s estimating it’s growth and rental income growth in the property and stuff like that so it’s good to see.

The last thing is your “Portfolio Tracker.” We can move this property to Portfolio Tracker. We can say yes purchase this property and you can change everything in there. You can put in your tenant details, click next, you can now sync with zero or continue without using it. Again as I said before there is that accounting software if you want to use that. The property has been successfully added to your portfolio tracker. Okay, so this is now taking us to our portfolio tracker and basically we can see our property here and you can go through and you can see your equity. This is giving you a forecast of your equity overtime, your cash flow, and you can track all your properties and everything there. You can set goals as well. I think this would only really be valuable if you had multiple properties. I think if you had one, two or even three properties you would probably manage your properties by yourself and you wouldn’t need this fancy graph or you could just do it in Excel and get a graph out of Excel. You wouldn’t need this software. But if you are a serious investor and you got over five properties that’s going to start getting hard to keep track of and so in that case this could be simple to use and could be easy. However to me I don’t find it very valuable at all.

There you have the details of Real Estate Investar and the review of Real Estate Investar. I think the Investar Search being able to search for properties using the keyword strategies and then the My Valuer tool being able to evaluate those properties and get those property reports and an unlimited amount of those property reports is extremely valuable. Those two tools are really for me what makes up the value of Real Estate Investar. You might find Development Search or My Research or the Analyser or the Tracker more useful than me. You’ve seen what it does and now it’s up to you whether you want to get it or not.

Let’s have a look at the pricing. There’re two different options, there’s Portfolio Manager and there’s Portfolio Builder. Most of you probably are going to want Portfolio Builder which helps you search for property, analyse property, all about that sort of stuff. Portfolio Manager is for people who own property and just want help managing the finances behind that property. With Portfolio Builder the pricing structure is here, its $249 per month with no minimum term; $149 per month on 12 month contract and $99 per month on a two-year contract. I’m currently on a two-year contract and I pay $99 per month for this program. You also get a free 21-day free trial if you go through my affiliate link and so that’s pretty cool you can try the program for three weeks before they start charging you.

If you’re going to be using the program ongoing like I do then I definitely recommend the 24 or the 12 month contract. But if you’re just going to buy one property and then after you’re not going to be able to buy another property for a couple years or something like that then I wouldn’t recommend these contracts. Yes you save money and you know $150 per month is a big difference between a 24-month contract on a no minimum term but if you’re only going to be using it for two months, you may as well pay the $500 rather than signing up for $99 a month which is going to cost you two and a half grand over the lifetime of that contract. So if you’re only going to be using it for a short term go the one month or the no minimum month and you also get that 21-day free trial as well so you can use it up for the first three weeks for free. So that’s the main pricing there.

If we go to the Portfolio Manager we can see that the pricing is cheaper – $49 per month on a two-year contract; $59 on a 12-month contract and sixty $69 per month on a month by month contract with no minimum term. That won’t give you access to those search functionality and everything like that but it’ll help you to analyse and track of your spending.

I already have a membership so I can go ahead and log in but if you were to create your own membership you would be maybe in the Portfolio Builder. Let’s say you’re going for the 24-month, just click start my free trial and that will then take you to the page where you can sign up and you can see here you can start your free trial. You need to go through and then you have to enter your credit card details because after the 21 days they’ll start charging you.
If you want to sign up then please, I do encourage you to go through my affiliate link. It won’t cost you anymore but it will help me create more videos like this and it will help the On Property brand. Go to www.onproperty.com.au/rei and the link will be below this video.

Thanks for watching this Real Estate Investor review. I hope that it’s been helpful to you, hopefully showing you the inside of Real Estate Investar, what I find valuable and what I don’t find valuable will help you make a decision as to whether or not this tool is for you.